MarkLite v1.0 — A Markdown Reader I Wanted to Exist

Why I Built It

I read a lot of Markdown notes. Specs, daily logs, scraped articles, my own scratchpads. The tools I had to choose from broke down like this: Typora is fine but commercial; Obsidian is for note-taking, not just reading; the rest are Electron wrappers that idle at 200 MB of RAM and feel like a website pretending to be an app.

I just wanted a thing that opens fast, renders clean, and gets out of the way.

What MarkLite Is

A native macOS Markdown reader. Tauri 2 shell — Rust binary plus the system WebView. Cold start under a second. The .dmg is 7 MB.

Five things it does:

• Folder mode: open a folder, browse notes in the sidebar, switch with arrow keys, full-text search across files
• PDF export: real page breaks, syntax-highlighted code, decent typography
• Light and dark themes: four typeface presets
• Drag and drop: drop a .md on the dock icon, it just opens
• Local only: no telemetry, no account, no cloud

It does not have an edit mode, plugins, sync, or AI features. That’s intentional.

Closed-Source and Free

This part needs explanation. MarkLite is free to download and use, but the source is private. No license file, no GitHub star button.

Two reasons. First, I don’t want to maintain a community around it. Issues, PRs, “can you add X” — every one of those is a small tax on attention. Second, an open repo I don’t actively defend invites scraper farms and reskinned forks. Closed and free sidesteps both.

If MarkLite ever stops working for me, I’ll keep using it offline anyway. There’s no backend to shut down.

How It Gets to You

No GitHub Release link. The dmg lives on Cloudflare R2, in its own bucket behind a product-specific subdomain, marklite-releases.openedon.com, and the download page is part of this site. No CI, no code signing yet, no auto-updater yet — those come in Phase 2; v1.0 was about proving the closed-source-on-CF distribution path works end to end.

R2 has zero egress fees. The 7 MB binary fits inside the free storage tier with room to spare. For a single-developer project, this is the cheapest distribution channel that exists.

Get It

Download MarkLite for macOS — Apple Silicon only for now, Intel build coming.

macOS will warn you about an unsigned developer. Right-click the app and choose Open, or use System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Code signing is queued for a later phase along with the auto-updater.

If it works for you, the highest compliment is to use it without telling me. If it breaks, [email protected].